Saturday, April 19, 2008

Money, That's What I Want

“Testosterone, best known as the male sex hormone, affects aggression, confidence and risk-taking.” That was the basis for a recent study showing that “those with higher levels of testosterone in the morning were more likely to” aggressively and confidently take risks and achieve success.Any man can tell you what conclusions the researchers drew from this: it explains why coach didn’t want his players having sex the night before a game: saving up all that testosterone would lead to aggressive play and a big win the next day.But no, these researchers studied the link between testosterone and stock market trading. Careful reading of the article explains why they didn’t consider the sports connection: they are “researchers at the University of Cambridge in England”, not manly American men.One of the researchers was from Northwestern University in the USA, but did not grasp the importance of this study vis a vis sports because she was, technically, not a man. Camelia Kuhnen, … said Coates and Herbert's findings "… help support the claim that emotion influences financial decisions." Psssh, like testosterone has anything to do with emotion. Leave it to women to confuse emotional response with visceral response; they are, after all, the same creatures who confuse intimacy with sex.Speaking of sex, this study “comes less than two weeks after U.S. researchers reported that young men shown erotic pictures were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such as a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler.” So I know you’re saying, “hey, these American researchers linked sex hormones and finance, are they from San Francisco or what?” No, the difference here is that the English nancy boy researchers started with a hypothesis about testosterone and risk-taking and immediately thought of not-sports. The Americans started with nothing but snake, a stapler and some porn and immediately thought, “Hey, how can we use these the things to get a grant instead of a real job.” Those same US researchers said, “Money and women trigger the same brain area in men.” Now, the odds that they are correct are good because there are not that many different brain areas in men. However, it does not seem intuitively correct because I have a completely different response to Money magazine than I do to Playboy magazine. Perhaps I’m making the wrong comparison. Maybe I need to compare my response to Money with my response to a Women Today magazine, which is, indeed, the same: I like money, I want to hold money, I want to use money but I don’t want to read about money and I never expect to understand what money thinks about or why it needs so many pairs of shoes.This screen shot from Friday’s MSNBC web page helps understand why male responses to money and women are linked:It says that results from companies like Citigroup helped boost stock prices. Right next to that it says “Citigroup posts big loss, to cut 9000 (jobs)”. That is completely illogical and incomprehensible, that is, it triggers precisely the same response in my brain as women do.